A full-length study of monocollocable words, i.e. words whose usage is severely restricted to one or a few combinations only (such as English ado in without much/further ado), that brings together corpus-based data from the four languages along with studies analysing, along both general and language-specific lines, monocollocable words in terms of their frequency, lexical as well as morphosyntactic behaviour, and various facets of their peripheral status.